


climbed aboard for rumoured shores

by bibliocratic



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode 159, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, episode 160, past Jon/Georgie - Freeform, soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-30
Updated: 2019-11-30
Packaged: 2021-02-18 12:35:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21610975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bibliocratic/pseuds/bibliocratic
Summary: Peter flicks a glance up, and Martin reads something like pity there. His face heats.“The Archivist?” Peter Lukas asks. His voice isn't mocking. Martin isn't sure what it it.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 55
Kudos: 878





	climbed aboard for rumoured shores

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from: The Wind Rose by Blanco White
> 
> Prompt and thanks to elf-grunge for the soulmate prompt. It's sort of what you asked for!

Martin's waging a passive-aggressive one-man war against an excel spreadsheet when the temperature, risen to bearable by the grunting old radiator in the corner, swan-dives into shivery.

“Peter,” Martin says, not exactly a greeting, as frayingly cordial as he can manage. Not absolving Peter's intrusion with his attention, triple-pressing the right mouse button and hissing an irate _oh come on_ when the computer refuses to bend to his will and instead freezes again.

Peter will say whatever mysterious bollocks he's come to imply and hint at and implicate, scattering his bloody breadcrumbs. Martin will be left just as pissed off and in the dark as he was before, so he might as well get it over with so Martin can _actually_ get some work done.

Surprisingly, Peter doesn't say anything. That's actually what makes Martin turn round.

Peter's slate-shingle eyes are observing Martin's exposed lower arms. Sleeves rolled up haphazard out of his way, folded over in messy and unmatching bunches at his elbow.

He's studying the designs that blemish the sun-ditched pale of his freckled arm with an interest Martin baulks at. Traces with his eyes the blocky wood-cut patterns in precise and abrupt black lines that start at the line of his watch, sprout up and under his clothes. Idly, he takes his time to let his gaze traverse over the open pages of tomes unfilled with words and unbroken by ink; the landscape of woodland and tree lines and shadowy hollows of roads mysterious or untaken that mar the faint curve of his lower arm. The lantern swinging on the bough of a wintry tree, its candle recently blown out.

The eye, thick and wide, staring out at the crease of his elbow.

Peter flicks a glance up, and Martin reads something like pity there. His face heats.

“The Archivist?” Peter Lukas asks. His voice isn't mocking. Martin isn't sure what it it.

He hates the tone of it.

“Do you _want_ something?” Martin responds curtly. Frosty. Tugging his sleeves back down pointedly.

Peter's expression is ever so proud.  
  


* * *

  
When Jon wakes up, he charts the changes death has wrought on him. Sitting on the small bed he's set up in document storage, swaddled in the uncomforting comfort of his archives, he chronicles the new damages done. The rough tissue of scars on his arms, upper legs, chest. Pitted marks from shrapnel and debris and being in the radius blast of an explosion. He supposes it could be worse.

He thumbs at the faded, almost unrecognisable nazar just below his shoulder, the crossed compass and ruler nearby in the same state. The colour bleeding out of them like they've been left too long in the dark. He doesn't think about his parents much. Not in a long time. His memories sanded down to an uncertain rote recollection that his brain is equally as likely to have invented as not. He doesn't recall enough to miss them, but there must be something there for him to still bear them on his skin.

There's a bleary shape splotched on his inner wrist. Forming like the build-up of sediment, the slow grind of tide, and it has been doing so for months, since before he died.

It's almost fully realised now. He rubs at the shape of it tentatively as though the colour might run if he's too rough with it. The delicate fawn-brown of its wings, the beaded black circle of its eyes.

He knows who it represents. Impossible not to, really. It's his representation after all. The complex understanding of a human being realised as imagery and flowering on his skin.

He stares at the nightingale for the longest time.  
  


* * *

  
When Martin was nine, struck by the well-echo hollow in his chest, unable to articulate the shamed and hot tears his mother would scold with a cluck of disappointment, he tried to clean the clock off his right leg. Sitting in the bath with the water gagging with too many bubbles, he scrubbed at the cogs and mechanical intestines of the thing, seeing the lies of his father in how it was wound, not wanting it, because surely if his dad had loved him then he wouldn't have left, and if he didn't then why should Martin boast his love so obviously. He held and scrubbed until his skin was pink and scalded and he'd started to wince. But connection doesn't work like that, and so the clock never disappeared, and Martin tried to ignore it every time he took a shower.

Turns out the Forsaken was good for something after all.  
  


* * *

  
“How's the poetry?” Jon stammers at him, so obviously, earnestly angling to drag out their impromptu meeting. Martin wants to be anywhere else but here.

“Jon, I really need to – ”

“Oh. Yeah. I – sorry, I-I know you've got... your thing with Peter Lukas.”

“It's not _like_ that – ”

“I-I know, I know, sorry, I didn't mean...” Jon stops. His eyes – and were they always so gaunt, so hungry in his face? – have stopped trying to both catch and avoid Martin's gaze apparently simultaneously, and they've snagged instead on Martin's collar. For a moment, something too thirsty catalogues the pale and vacant skin of his throat, where the purple hooded bells of monkshood usually thronged. Their leaves had grown spikier as he'd aged, stretching out to his Adam's apple in a bid to form a collar of choking vines.

“Martin...” Jon stares at empty skin, and his expression blooms into something comprehending and distraught.

“I have to _go_ , Jon,” Martin says forcefully. He doesn't give Jon much of a chance to reply.

He doesn't want Jon's sorries. Doesn't need his worries or his understanding.

He just wants him to be safe.  
  


* * *

  
The nightingale sings entangled by coarse and insidious brambles. Jon's taken to holding his hand over the pattern, like shielding with a careful hand a wind-tossed, guttering flame, when the hunger starts to gnaw though him like frostbite.

It doesn't stop there. The emblems grow into iconography, twist into tableau. The pictures grow and spread simply as moss, and Jon doesn't despair because he doesn't have the space for it any more.

Jon's evidence has always been discrete. The stamped shapes for his parents like memorial images were all he held for the longest time. Something started to flourish for his grandmother, when she took him in, and he tried to show her the blotched shape in a childish effort to bring them closer. She hadn't needed to stay anything. She pursed her lip and strained an apologetic glance and he knew even at that age that there was nothing, would be nothing in kind, decorating her skin for him. That choked the image like weeds, and it faded quickly as the passing of inclement weather.

The space, at his jutting hip-bone, was only later taken up by Georgie's mark. That one never faded quite like the image for his grandmother or for his parents, but it went sun-stained and overexposed long before they broke up.

Martin's imagery is not so subtle.

It swallows up his arm, roils over his shoulder-blades, infects the untouched skin over his collar bone.

Jon takes to wearing longer sleeves.  
  


* * *

  
Martin's skin has always taken easily to marking. Some people do, he guesses. Wear their hearts on their sleeves, on their throat, on their stomach. Martin's a scattered museum of loves that he's tended to over the years, unrequited affections or spluttered out romances.

He's pleased, in those early days, that nothing ever bruises on his skin for Jon. He likes Jon, even fancies him, for a long time. And it's annoying, because Jon can be a real arse, but it's manageable. Jon doesn't make him go hot at the nape of his neck or make him stumble over his words. His presence encourages harmless daydreams and flights of fancy, but Martin's under no illusions.

And then Jon listens to his statement. Sits him down, and believes him, and doesn't break eye contact the whole time.

And Martin had felt, dazedly, Seen. For the first time in a long time.

The first eye had opened up around then like an unclenching fist under his ribs. He'd seen it a week later. Had thought _oh_ and had quickly dressed to cover it.

It's not the first mark this love leaves him. In time, it scores him with tooth marks and sailor's knots of worry, and eyes, always eyes, blinking open over his flesh.

He loses the one on his ankle first. Scratches at the space where it was, touching the crease where his sock has dug a band around his skin, right where the line used to bisect the thick and dark pupil.

Then the one on his lower back. His upper thigh. His left wrist.

_It's for the best, Martin,_ Peter says when he catches him looking at the undamaged patch of skin these absences leave behind.

Martin doesn't disagree.

By the time Lukas banishes him to the mercy of Forsaken, thwarted and cheated and feeling something almost human, Martin's skin has already been entirely washed clean.  
  


* * *

  
There's a nightingale on Jon's wrist. It's one of the first things that catches his vision, that refocuses from blurry in this undemanding nothing. The colour is too vivid, lurid in this desaturated landscape.

The bird is nestled, or maybe caught, in a twisting of brambles but its beak is open in song.

“Look at me, and tell me what you See,” Jon asks him, and Martin wonders if maybe Jon's been carrying around his own heart on his sleeve for a while now.  
  


* * *

  
His mother's flowers don't grow back when he vacates the Lonely. His father's clockwork finally cleansed from him. The leaves and keys and umbrellas of the numerous small loves and connections he's now lost the taste of.

Martin's skin remains unblemished and clear, and he wonders if the Lonely took this capacity from him.

Jon's hand is dry in his. And nothing blooms on Martin's arms but a sensation like prickling, like pins and needles, settles under his skin, and Martin holds on just as tightly.  
  


* * *

There was a downpour on the way back to the safehouse. The sky splitting with a cascade of rain, sheets moving in waves and quickly transforming dewy grass into boggy swamp-land. Their waterproofs, such as they are, have done a poor job and failed to live up to their name, and Jon is dripping a cloud's-worth of rainfall from his hair alone as he crosses the threshold. Martin, no different, water draining off him like guttering, tuts. Helps him strip the sucking, soaking outer layers off, frigid fingers fumbling with the pull of the zip. Jon awkwardly gets in the way in his efforts to return the gesture, making a face at the sodden slump of Martin's waterlogged woollen jumper as it hits the floor. Martin catches his t-shirt on his nose as he tries to pull it over his head, trying to unbutton and kick off his clinging trousers in one motion.

He doesn't feel embarrassed. Doesn't cross his mind to be. It's hard, when Jon's snickering as he nearly trips over his own legs in his efforts to shake his legs free, when they've been clung to each other like tethered buoys each night, coddled by the unbroken dark.

“I'll get dry clothes,” Martin says, the first to have divested himself of most of his clothes, and he bounds upstairs, damp feet squeaking and slipping, longing for a hot shower as he trails puddles into the bedroom. He throws on thick pyjama bottoms, is half wrenching on an errant t-shirt before he realises it's Jon's and has to rifle around for a spare one of his own before he slips it on. He collects some clothes for Jon and rushes back.

Jon's managed to get off his own trousers, slopped in a pile of fabric by his feet, the skin goosepimpling and dark hair standing stark from the chill. He's pulling his sticking vest off over his head as Martin returns.

Martin sucks in a gasp. Jon blinks, confused for a moment before a reddening mark stripes across the bridge of his nose, his cheeks, splotches at the dip of his neckline.

“What...?” Martin starts, staring at the tapestry on his skin, and he can't help it.

Before, Tim would joke that Jon loved his job more than he loved people. Was probably conservatively decorated in little stylisations of his perpetually present tape-recorders, probably had a library over his heart. It was something he said as a joke at the beginning and hissed as a recrimination by the end, and Martin and Sasha (and later only Martin) would tell him off, tell him to keep it down, that it wasn't fair, that it wasn't his business. But if Jon had been marked, they wouldn't have known. They were hidden under crisp shirt sleeves and well-placed collars even in summer.

The nightingale, wings scratched by thorns, was the first image Martin had ever seen Jon wear. He'd expected that to be it, had hoped such an emblem was meant for him, but it, well, it is dwarfed in comparison to the harmony of colour struck over Jon's body like a collage.

Every piece of skin that is not torn up and jagged with scars has been brought into the striking shock of deep blues and blacks that slide and ring over dark skin. A choir of imagery that Martin can't decipher immediately, like a jigsaw he has to step back from, the artworks all wrapped up in each other, each feeding off the other. There are nightingales, some grounded on thin wind-touched branches, some held mid-flight; these become a stylised compass pointing north. There's the solid structure of a lighthouse taking up most of his gangly upper arm, its lower levels painted in a sea bound mist, or it could be the curling wisps of inviting steam. His stomach, curving concave, is overwhelmed by the imperious crags of icy cliffs, the rocks dashed by high foaming waves, above which hangs the ribboning line of northern lights. On the sea, a sturdy boat tipping on the water, its spinnaker puffed out and billowing in defiance.

There is _so much_ , so much of Jon taken up, painted in testament, and for a long moment, Martin doesn't understand.

Jon looks at his feet, and then glances, almost shyly, at Martin's unpainted throat, his blank arms. Visibly steels himself, moves his gaze up to meet Martin's.

“It...” he begins, before he breathes in, sets his spine straight. “You. It's – it's you. In case, in case you didn't know.”

“Can – ?” Martin asks, and his fingers are twitching, yearning to trace the lines, to memorise their shapes, and Jon blinks again and then makes a nervy nodding motion.

Martin's about to reach out before he remembers that Jon's half-naked and dripping wet in the hallway, that the stone flags will be frozen on his feet, that now is perhaps not the ideal time.

Later. After they warm up, after they shower and the gas boiler grunts and complains and then near-burns them with hot water, after they dress in pyjamas warmed on the radiators, after they go upstairs. Martin runs his hand reverently, shakily over the lighthouse, the compass, the boat, the birds, wonders if this is how Jon sees him, how Jon understands him, wonders why he's taken up so much space. Looks at all the pictures that are both isolation and sanctuary, song and sorrow and strength, tries to decipher what Jon sees in him.

“There's so much,” he marvels softly, scarcely believing, hovering the pads of his fingers over the horizon line of a lightening sky, the peaking gleam of a sunrise at Jon's lower back, the anchor bound in twisting rope around his ankle bone, the up shoots of snow-drops and lily-of-the-valley not far away. Most people get one image, maybe two or three, as proof of meaning to another person, as a tangible reflection of connection. Martin has an entire gallery exhibited across Jon's body.

“You mean so much,” Jon says softly in response, like that explains it. Maybe for him, it does.

He charts the other bold designs he finds. Realising that for all his earlier pretences, Jon has not, and never has been an island. There's Daisy's faintly rusted golden chain caked in mud and blood around his other ankle, Gerard Keay's thick leather-bound book, its open pages wreathed in fire, the near-vanished marks for his parents, for Georgie, the scant others who came into his life and left their mark.

There might have been an eye, wide and open and unyielding, and it would stare out at the bottom of Jon's throat if it wasn't for the rush of wild-flowers also grown there, snow-drops and holly-berries obscuring its vision.

Jon asks him, falteringly, as though unsure of forming the question in his mouth, what Martin had. Before the sea-salt wash of Forsaken cleaned them from him.

And Martin points to where his mum, his dad, his old loves left their remembrances on him. Carefully, honestly, he tells Jon about the tooth marks clamped around limbs like he'd been bitten, because it was not always a kind love Jon made him feel. The eyes that near the end had swarmed like frog-spawn around his middle, slashed across his back like a constellation. The forbidding forest on his arm, the lantern.

Jon strokes the places where he would have seen these things.

“If they don't come back....” Martin says, and Jon hums.

“They might not,” he says. “That's... that's OK.”

“But...”

“It doesn't matter,” Jon says, and he touches at the space where he would have marked Martin ever so kindly. “Something new might show up. In time.”

“Yeah?” Martin croaks, and it's not a question of if it will or not. Jon's looking up at him, a smile on his face, his whole body inked with how much he feels, all the words he finds so difficult to express writ large on his body. Martin's heart feels too big for his chest. And he wonders what meaning they might make of each other together.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Freedom Tastes Of Reality](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25757476) by [Haberdasher](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haberdasher/pseuds/Haberdasher)




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